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A spectrogram is a visual representation of the
spectrum A spectrum (: spectra or spectrums) is a set of related ideas, objects, or properties whose features overlap such that they blend to form a continuum. The word ''spectrum'' was first used scientifically in optics to describe the rainbow of co ...
of
frequencies Frequency is the number of occurrences of a repeating event per unit of time. Frequency is an important parameter used in science and engineering to specify the rate of oscillatory and vibratory phenomena, such as mechanical vibrations, audio ...
of a signal as it varies with time. When applied to an
audio signal An audio signal is a representation of sound, typically using either a changing level of electrical voltage for analog signals or a series of binary numbers for Digital signal (signal processing), digital signals. Audio signals have frequencies i ...
, spectrograms are sometimes called sonographs, voiceprints, or voicegrams. When the data are represented in a 3D plot they may be called '' waterfall displays''. Spectrograms are used extensively in the fields of
music Music is the arrangement of sound to create some combination of Musical form, form, harmony, melody, rhythm, or otherwise Musical expression, expressive content. Music is generally agreed to be a cultural universal that is present in all hum ...
,
linguistics Linguistics is the scientific study of language. The areas of linguistic analysis are syntax (rules governing the structure of sentences), semantics (meaning), Morphology (linguistics), morphology (structure of words), phonetics (speech sounds ...
,
sonar Sonar (sound navigation and ranging or sonic navigation and ranging) is a technique that uses sound propagation (usually underwater, as in submarine navigation) to navigate, measure distances ( ranging), communicate with or detect objects o ...
,
radar Radar is a system that uses radio waves to determine the distance ('' ranging''), direction ( azimuth and elevation angles), and radial velocity of objects relative to the site. It is a radiodetermination method used to detect and track ...
,
speech processing Speech processing is the study of speech signals and the processing methods of signals. The signals are usually processed in a digital representation, so speech processing can be regarded as a special case of digital signal processing, applied to ...
,
seismology Seismology (; from Ancient Greek σεισμός (''seismós'') meaning "earthquake" and -λογία (''-logía'') meaning "study of") is the scientific study of earthquakes (or generally, quakes) and the generation and propagation of elastic ...
,
ornithology Ornithology, from Ancient Greek ὄρνις (''órnis''), meaning "bird", and -logy from λόγος (''lógos''), meaning "study", is a branch of zoology dedicated to the study of birds. Several aspects of ornithology differ from related discip ...
, and others. Spectrograms of audio can be used to identify spoken words
phonetic Phonetics is a branch of linguistics that studies how humans produce and perceive sounds or, in the case of sign languages, the equivalent aspects of sign. Linguists who specialize in studying the physical properties of speech are phoneticians ...
ally, and to analyse the various calls of animals. A spectrogram can be generated by an
optical spectrometer An optical spectrometer (spectrophotometer, spectrograph or spectroscope) is an instrument used to measure properties of light over a specific portion of the electromagnetic spectrum, typically used in spectroscopic analysis to identify mate ...
, a bank of
band-pass filter A band-pass filter or bandpass filter (BPF) is a device that passes frequencies within a certain range and rejects ( attenuates) frequencies outside that range. It is the inverse of a '' band-stop filter''. Description In electronics and s ...
s, by
Fourier transform In mathematics, the Fourier transform (FT) is an integral transform that takes a function as input then outputs another function that describes the extent to which various frequencies are present in the original function. The output of the tr ...
or by a wavelet transform (in which case it is also known as a scaleogram or scalogram). A spectrogram is usually depicted as a
heat map A heat map (or heatmap) is a 2-dimensional data visualization technique that represents the magnitude of individual values within a dataset as a color. The variation in color may be by hue or intensity. In some applications such as crime analy ...
, i.e., as an image with the intensity shown by varying the
colour Color (or colour in Commonwealth English; see spelling differences) is the visual perception based on the electromagnetic spectrum. Though color is not an inherent property of matter, color perception is related to an object's light absorp ...
or
brightness Brightness is an attribute of visual perception in which a source appears to be radiating/reflecting light. In other words, brightness is the perception dictated by the luminance of a visual target. The perception is not linear to luminance, and ...
.


Format

A common format is a graph with two geometric dimensions: one axis represents
time Time is the continuous progression of existence that occurs in an apparently irreversible process, irreversible succession from the past, through the present, and into the future. It is a component quantity of various measurements used to sequ ...
, and the other axis represents
frequency Frequency is the number of occurrences of a repeating event per unit of time. Frequency is an important parameter used in science and engineering to specify the rate of oscillatory and vibratory phenomena, such as mechanical vibrations, audio ...
; a third dimension indicating the
amplitude The amplitude of a periodic variable is a measure of its change in a single period (such as time or spatial period). The amplitude of a non-periodic signal is its magnitude compared with a reference value. There are various definitions of am ...
of a particular frequency at a particular time is represented by the
intensity Intensity may refer to: In colloquial use * Strength (disambiguation) *Amplitude * Level (disambiguation) * Magnitude (disambiguation) In physical sciences Physics *Intensity (physics), power per unit area (W/m2) *Field strength of electric, m ...
or color of each point in the image. There are many variations of format: sometimes the vertical and horizontal axes are switched, so time runs up and down; sometimes as a waterfall plot where the amplitude is represented by height of a 3D surface instead of color or intensity. The frequency and amplitude axes can be either
linear In mathematics, the term ''linear'' is used in two distinct senses for two different properties: * linearity of a '' function'' (or '' mapping''); * linearity of a '' polynomial''. An example of a linear function is the function defined by f(x) ...
or
logarithm In mathematics, the logarithm of a number is the exponent by which another fixed value, the base, must be raised to produce that number. For example, the logarithm of to base is , because is to the rd power: . More generally, if , the ...
ic, depending on what the graph is being used for. Audio would usually be represented with a logarithmic amplitude axis (probably in
decibel The decibel (symbol: dB) is a relative unit of measurement equal to one tenth of a bel (B). It expresses the ratio of two values of a Power, root-power, and field quantities, power or root-power quantity on a logarithmic scale. Two signals whos ...
s, or dB), and frequency would be linear to emphasize harmonic relationships, or logarithmic to emphasize musical, tonal relationships.


Generation

Spectrograms of light may be created directly using an
optical spectrometer An optical spectrometer (spectrophotometer, spectrograph or spectroscope) is an instrument used to measure properties of light over a specific portion of the electromagnetic spectrum, typically used in spectroscopic analysis to identify mate ...
over time. Spectrograms may be created from a
time-domain In mathematics and signal processing, the time domain is a representation of how a signal, function, or data set varies with time. It is used for the analysis of function (mathematics), mathematical functions, physical signal (information theory), ...
signal in one of two ways: approximated as a filterbank that results from a series of
band-pass filter A band-pass filter or bandpass filter (BPF) is a device that passes frequencies within a certain range and rejects ( attenuates) frequencies outside that range. It is the inverse of a '' band-stop filter''. Description In electronics and s ...
s (this was the only way before the advent of modern digital signal processing), or calculated from the time signal using the
Fourier transform In mathematics, the Fourier transform (FT) is an integral transform that takes a function as input then outputs another function that describes the extent to which various frequencies are present in the original function. The output of the tr ...
. These two methods actually form two different
time–frequency representation A time–frequency representation (TFR) is a view of a signal (taken to be a function of time) represented over both time and frequency. Time–frequency analysis means analysis into the time–frequency domain provided by a TFR. This is achieved ...
s, but are equivalent under some conditions. The bandpass filters method usually uses analog processing to divide the input signal into frequency bands; the magnitude of each filter's output controls a transducer that records the spectrogram as an image on paper. Creating a spectrogram using the FFT is a digital process. Digitally
sampled Sample or samples may refer to: * Sample (graphics), an intersection of a color channel and a pixel * Sample (material), a specimen or small quantity of something * Sample (signal), a digital discrete sample of a continuous analog signal * Sample ...
data, in the
time domain In mathematics and signal processing, the time domain is a representation of how a signal, function, or data set varies with time. It is used for the analysis of mathematical functions, physical signals or time series of economic or environmental ...
, is broken up into chunks, which usually overlap, and Fourier transformed to calculate the magnitude of the frequency spectrum for each chunk. Each chunk then corresponds to a vertical line in the image; a measurement of magnitude versus frequency for a specific moment in time (the midpoint of the chunk). These spectrums or time plots are then "laid side by side" to form the image or a three-dimensional surface, or slightly overlapped in various ways, i.e. windowing. This process essentially corresponds to computing the squared
magnitude Magnitude may refer to: Mathematics *Euclidean vector, a quantity defined by both its magnitude and its direction *Magnitude (mathematics), the relative size of an object *Norm (mathematics), a term for the size or length of a vector *Order of ...
of the
short-time Fourier transform The short-time Fourier transform (STFT) is a Fourier-related transform used to determine the sinusoidal frequency and phase content of local sections of a signal as it changes over time. In practice, the procedure for computing STFTs is to divide ...
(STFT) of the signal s(t) — that is, for a window width \omega, \mathrm(t,\omega)=\left, \mathrm(t,\omega)\^2.


Limitations and resynthesis

From the formula above, it appears that a spectrogram contains no information about the exact, or even approximate,
phase Phase or phases may refer to: Science *State of matter, or phase, one of the distinct forms in which matter can exist *Phase (matter), a region of space throughout which all physical properties are essentially uniform *Phase space, a mathematica ...
of the signal that it represents. For this reason, it is not possible to reverse the process and generate a copy of the original signal from a spectrogram, though in situations where the exact initial phase is unimportant it may be possible to generate a useful approximation of the original signal. The Analysis & Resynthesis Sound Spectrograph is an example of a computer program that attempts to do this. The
pattern playback The pattern playback is an early talking device that was built by Dr. Franklin S. Cooper and his colleagues, including John M. Borst and Caryl Haskins, at Haskins Laboratories in the late 1940s and completed in 1950. There were several different ...
was an early speech synthesizer, designed at Haskins Laboratories in the late 1940s, that converted pictures of the acoustic patterns of speech (spectrograms) back into sound. In fact, there is some phase information in the spectrogram, but it appears in another form, as time delay (or
group delay In signal processing, group delay and phase delay are functions that describe in different ways the delay times experienced by a signal’s various sinusoidal frequency components as they pass through a linear time-invariant (LTI) system (such as ...
) which is the dual of the
instantaneous frequency Instantaneous phase and frequency are important concepts in signal processing that occur in the context of the representation and analysis of time-varying functions. The instantaneous phase (also known as local phase or simply phase) of a ''compl ...
. The size and shape of the analysis window can be varied. A smaller (shorter) window will produce more accurate results in timing, at the expense of precision of frequency representation. A larger (longer) window will provide a more precise frequency representation, at the expense of precision in timing representation. This is an instance of the
Heisenberg uncertainty principle The uncertainty principle, also known as Heisenberg's indeterminacy principle, is a fundamental concept in quantum mechanics. It states that there is a limit to the precision with which certain pairs of physical properties, such as position a ...
, that the product of the precision in two
conjugate variables Conjugate variables are pairs of variables mathematically defined in such a way that they become Fourier transform duals, or more generally are related through Pontryagin duality. The duality relations lead naturally to an uncertainty relation— ...
is greater than or equal to a constant (B*T>=1 in the usual notation).


Applications

* Early analog spectrograms were applied to a wide range of areas including the study of bird calls (such as that of the
great tit The great tit (''Parus major'') is a small passerine bird in the tit family Paridae. It is a widespread and common species throughout Europe, the Middle East, Central Asia and east across the Palearctic to the Amur River, south to parts of No ...
), with current research continuing using modern digital equipment and applied to all animal sounds. Contemporary use of the digital spectrogram is especially useful for studying
frequency modulation Frequency modulation (FM) is a signal modulation technique used in electronic communication, originally for transmitting messages with a radio wave. In frequency modulation a carrier wave is varied in its instantaneous frequency in proporti ...
(FM) in animal calls. Specifically, the distinguishing characteristics of FM chirps, broadband clicks, and social harmonizing are most easily visualized with the spectrogram. * Spectrograms are useful in assisting in overcoming speech deficits and in speech training for the portion of the population that is profoundly
deaf Deafness has varying definitions in cultural and medical contexts. In medical contexts, the meaning of deafness is hearing loss that precludes a person from understanding spoken language, an audiological condition. In this context it is written ...
. * The studies of
phonetics Phonetics is a branch of linguistics that studies how humans produce and perceive sounds or, in the case of sign languages, the equivalent aspects of sign. Linguists who specialize in studying the physical properties of speech are phoneticians ...
and
speech synthesis Speech synthesis is the artificial production of human speech. A computer system used for this purpose is called a speech synthesizer, and can be implemented in software or hardware products. A text-to-speech (TTS) system converts normal langua ...
are often facilitated through the use of spectrograms. * In deep learning-keyed speech synthesis, spectrogram (or spectrogram in
mel scale The mel scale (after the word ''melody'') is a perceptual scale of pitches judged by listeners to be equal in distance from one another. The reference point between this scale and normal frequency measurement is defined by assigning a percept ...
) is first predicted by a seq2seq model, then the spectrogram is fed to a neural vocoder to derive the synthesized raw waveform. * By reversing the process of producing a spectrogram, it is possible to create a signal whose spectrogram is an arbitrary image. This technique can be used to hide a picture in a piece of audio and has been employed by several
electronic music Electronic music broadly is a group of music genres that employ electronic musical instruments, circuitry-based music technology and software, or general-purpose electronics (such as personal computers) in its creation. It includes both music ...
artists. See also
Steganography Steganography ( ) is the practice of representing information within another message or physical object, in such a manner that the presence of the concealed information would not be evident to an unsuspecting person's examination. In computing/ ...
. * Some modern music is created using spectrograms as an intermediate medium; changing the intensity of different frequencies over time, or even creating new ones, by drawing them and then inverse transforming. See
Audio timescale-pitch modification Audio most commonly refers to sound, as it is transmitted in signal form. It may also refer to: Sound *Audio signal, an electrical representation of sound *Audio frequency, a frequency in the audio spectrum *Digital audio, representation of sound ...
and Phase vocoder. * Spectrograms can be used to analyze the results of passing a test signal through a signal processor such as a filter in order to check its performance. * High definition spectrograms are used in the development of RF and microwave systems. * Spectrograms are now used to display
scattering parameters Scattering parameters or S-parameters (the elements of a scattering matrix or S-matrix) describe the electrical behavior of linear electrical networks when undergoing various steady state stimuli by electrical signals. The parameters are useful ...
measured with vector network analyzers. * The
US Geological Survey The United States Geological Survey (USGS), founded as the Geological Survey, is an agency of the U.S. Department of the Interior whose work spans the disciplines of biology, geography, geology, and hydrology. The agency was founded on March ...
and the
IRIS Consortium IRIS (Incorporated Research Institutions for Seismology) was a university research consortium dedicated to exploring the Earth's interior through the collection and distribution of seismographic data. It operated the U.S. National Science Foundati ...
provide near real-time spectrogram displays for monitoring seismic stations * Spectrograms can be used with
recurrent neural network Recurrent neural networks (RNNs) are a class of artificial neural networks designed for processing sequential data, such as text, speech, and time series, where the order of elements is important. Unlike feedforward neural networks, which proces ...
s for
speech recognition Speech recognition is an interdisciplinary subfield of computer science and computational linguistics that develops methodologies and technologies that enable the recognition and translation of spoken language into text by computers. It is also ...
. * Individuals' spectrograms are collected by the
Chinese government The government of the People's Republic of China is based on a system of people's congress within the parameters of a Unitary state, unitary communist state, in which the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) enacts its policies through people's ...
as part of its
mass surveillance Mass surveillance is the intricate surveillance of an entire or a substantial fraction of a population in order to monitor that group of citizens. The surveillance is often carried out by Local government, local and federal governments or intell ...
programs. * For a vibration signal, a spectrogram's color scale identifies the frequencies of a waveform's amplitude peaks over time. Unlike a time or frequency graph, a spectrogram correlates peak values to time and frequency. Vibration test engineers use spectrograms to analyze the frequency content of a continuous waveform, locating strong signals and determining how the vibration behavior changes over time. * Spectrograms can be used to analyze speech in two different applications: automatic detection of speech deficits in cochlear implant users and phoneme class recognition to extract phone-attribute features. * In order to obtain a speaker's pronunciation characteristics, some researchers proposed a method based on an idea from bionics, which uses spectrogram statistics to achieve a characteristic spectrogram to give a stable representation of the speaker's pronunciation from a linear superposition of short-time spectrograms. * Researchers explore a novel approach to ECG signal analysis by leveraging spectrogram techniques, possibly for enhanced visualization and understanding. The integration of MFCC for feature extraction suggests a cross-disciplinary application, borrowing methods from audio processing to extract relevant information from biomedical signals. * Accurate interpretation of temperature indicating paint (TIP) is of great importance in aviation and other industrial applications. 2D spectrogram of TIP can be used in temperature interpretation. * The spectrogram can be used to process the signal for the rate of change of the human thorax. By visualizing respiratory signals using a spectrogram, the researchers have proposed an approach to the classification of respiration states based on a neural network model.


See also

*
Acoustic signature The term acoustic signature is used to describe a combination of acoustic emissions of sound emitters, such as those of ships and submarines. In addition, aircraft, machinery, and living animals can be described as having their own characteristic ...
* Chromagram *
Fourier analysis In mathematics, Fourier analysis () is the study of the way general functions may be represented or approximated by sums of simpler trigonometric functions. Fourier analysis grew from the study of Fourier series, and is named after Joseph Fo ...
for computing periodicity in evenly spaced data * Generalized spectrogram *
Least-squares spectral analysis Least-squares spectral analysis (LSSA) is a method of estimating a Spectral density estimation#Overview, frequency spectrum based on a least-squares fit of Sine wave, sinusoids to data samples, similar to Fourier analysis. Fourier analysis, the ...
for computing periodicity in unevenly spaced data * List of unexplained sounds * Reassignment method * Spectral music *
Spectrometer A spectrometer () is a scientific instrument used to separate and measure Spectrum, spectral components of a physical phenomenon. Spectrometer is a broad term often used to describe instruments that measure a continuous variable of a phenomeno ...
* Strobe tuner *
Waveform In electronics, acoustics, and related fields, the waveform of a signal is the shape of its Graph of a function, graph as a function of time, independent of its time and Magnitude (mathematics), magnitude Scale (ratio), scales and of any dis ...


References


External links

{{Wiktionary
See an online spectrogram of speech or other sounds captured by your computer's microphone.

Generating a tone sequence whose spectrogram matches an arbitrary text, online


* ttps://web.archive.org/web/20120331164713/https://kdenlive.org/users/granjow/introducing-scopes-audio-spectrum-and-spectrogram Article describing the development of a software spectrogram
History of spectrograms & development of instrumentation


from a linguistic professor's ''Monthly Mystery Spectrogram'' publication.
Sonogram Visible Speech
GPL Licensed freeware for the Spectrogram generation of Signal Files. Acoustic measurement Signal processing Time–frequency analysis Spectrum (physical sciences)